


Desert Honour

by Writelyso



Category: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020), Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Animal Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25059820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writelyso/pseuds/Writelyso
Summary: Slightly tweaked/alternative ending to MFCOT, from Jack's pov.
Relationships: Phryne Fisher & Jack Robinson, Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson
Comments: 17
Kudos: 57





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First ever fan fic! I’m so honoured to try some variations on these wonderful characters created by Kerry Greenwood and brilliantly interpreted by everyone involved with the MFMM television show and feature film. 
> 
> I loved the movie, I really did, but I just could not accept that Jack Robinson, man of honour, would ignore the fact that Phryne was married. That was just too liberal-minded, I thought, and to me ran contrary to everything established in the TV series about his principles. So I reimagined it. And along the way, I surprised myself by answering the question of, what happened to the second camel?

Chapter 1

When the sound of the gunshot shattered the Negev night, time suspended long enough for images of The Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher apparently dead in a racing motorcar, then apparently dead on the top of a steam train, and now apparently dead in a desert tent, to pass through Detective Inspector Jack Robinson’s mind. His heart too stopped dead for an instant. Then action surged out from behind his fear and he sprinted the short, chaste distance between their tents, before Fatima had a chance to repeat her startled camel whinny. 

Jack realized instantly that Phryne’s story about shooting at a tarantula was a ruse devised to summon him to her ridiculously opulent tent, but he acceded to it so he could buy a moment to go outside and collect his thoughts, which were racing wildly at finding himself alone with his colleague and friend Phryne in her sleeping quarters. They were very far from home or anything else remotely familiar to him, and Jack realized he was clinging to propriety like an astrolabe to help him navigate the unknown landscape.

Jack leaned against the tentpole and smiled quietly as he reran in his head the variety of flirtatious ruses which Phryne had previously used in an effort to ruffle his composure – she needed his business card as a woman alone and newly arrived in a dangerous town; she “had” to touch him after jumping up behind him on the pillion of a motorcycle; her red-clad rump needed steadied as she precariously unlocked a secret compartment high up in a cupboard; she complained coquettishly that no-one could get in if she locked her winter bedroom door. Jack allowed himself a small, amused smile at her audacity and his own powers of resistance.

Detective Inspector Robinson marshalled the facts: 1. Phryne was now a married woman. 2. A marriage is a marriage 3. He was immutably a man of honour. 

Jack fired a bogus tarantula-killing shot into the air to seal his resolve, and re-entered Phryne’s tent, intending to return her gun and take his leave. Phryne did not make it easy, shimmering so close to him, lightly touching his chest while declaring her fear of only two things: spiders and her Aunt P. 

“May I tell you my fear, Miss Fisher?” Sheer will kept his deep voice steady.

“Of course.” Her hands slipped up to where his braces crossed over his shoulders, as she expectantly awaited his flirtatious riposte.

“I’m afraid if you don’t immediately take one step back, I’ll help you make a mockery of your wedding vows. And I fear I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”

Phryne did take one step back, in surprise. Her left hand still rested on Jack’s shoulder, unwittingly echoing the frame of their waltz at the Grand Hotel so long ago, on a previous unconsummated occasion.

“Jack.” She held his eyes. “A marriage is a marriage,” she said softly, as understanding dawned, and she resigned herself, with grudging respect, to his maddening rectitude. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he responded, stepping back in turn, breaking the physical contact. “Goodnight, Miss Fisher,” he managed, wresting his traitorously readable eyes out of contact also. “Sleep well.” 

Back in his own sparse tent, on a camp cot far too narrow and short for his lanky frame, Jack tried to sink back into the latest Zane Grey but the plight of Clint Belmet, who married for expediency rather than love, cut rather too close to Phryne’s situation with the Maharaja of Alwar to provide any real distraction. Despairing of sleep, Jack stepped outside and stretched out on his back on the night-cooled sand, head resting on his clasped hands, to wait under the stars for the desert dawn. He sifted lazily through an assortment of memories: the afternoon he had lassooed Phryne like a Zane Grey cowboy, although with a football scarf rather than a lariat; the evening at the theatre she had asked him to recite and before he could edit himself, he’d blurted out Enobarbus’s besotted description of Cleopatra. He fondly reviewed the metaphors his brain had conjured for her over the years of their friendship: she was a freight train, a moth attracted inexorably to the flame of danger, the heavy artillery to be wheeled in, Peter Pan, a world-saver, a guardian angel, but not a telescope (and he smiled at the memory of how that particular image that had seemed so clear in his mind had been completely inexplicable once articulated out loud). And those were only the comparisons he had said aloud. In the private chambers of his own heart, he silently compared her to the stars and heavens, and acknowledged she was the perfect repository for his own lost heart.

Jack indulged himself by taking out and examining his memory of the heady moment months ago at the airfield, when his divorced lips had met Phryne’s single ones, neither of them bound to another, all obstacles (except her impending departure) finally vanquished. But that situation had changed, thanks to the Maharaja and to Phryne’s willingness to help and protect any friend in need.

Impinging on his reverie, Jack became aware of odd huffs and chucks coming from the area where they had left the camels (the “simply mammals” as Phryne called them sometimes as an in-joke). Fatima had settled back down after the two unexpected gunshots, but Noora was clearly in some distress. Jack brought the elderly animal some water which she attempted weakly, and oats which she ignored completely. “An even-toed ungulate in the genus Camelus” his sleep-starved brain offered, but he could dredge up no stored mental tips on how to treat an ailing camel and by morning old Noora was dead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conclusion of my slightly reimagined ending for MFCOT.
> 
> There was only one...camel? Tent? Way to proceed?

The practical problem of what to do with a dead camel at least gave Jack and Phryne a neutral topic of discussion in a morning that might otherwise have been fraught with awkwardness and which, if he was honest, was tinged by regret on Jack’s part and, he fervently hoped, on Phryne’s. By the time they had struck camp in the early light, they had agreed to leave poor old Noora’s carcass in the oasis, certain that within hours, the next group of Bedouins to pass that way would efficiently harvest the beast’s hair and hide, and consider it a windfall.

This, however, left Jack and Phryne continuing their searing journey cramped together on Fatima’s back, which phased Phryne much less than it did Jack. He felt and no doubt looked uncomfortably hot, defeated, sweaty and decidedly grumpy as they plodded on in the unforgiving sun. Even flippant Phryne knew better than to tease that, being in the passenger seat, he was going to have to touch her. Jack’s usually witty brain offered him only the obvious metaphor about being thrust uncomfortably together with Phryne Fisher in a joint enterprise where she unflappably held the reins. This reminded him of his early mistake in telling Constable Hugh Collins that they would have to show Miss Fisher who wore the trousers, and how it had turned out to be her. And here she was again, quite literally driving the situation as she urged Fatima on across the interminable sands.

Jack was dreading that night’s stop, given that they had had to consolidate their packing to fit onto the one remaining camel, which entailed leaving his tent behind. Belied by his impassive face, he struggled internally with the puzzle of how a man of honour would be expected to behave in such circumstances: would this be, ahem, the straw that broke the camel’s back, the last straw that would cause him to, ahem, desert honour and principle? Jack knew the awful puns bubbling up in his head indicated the extent of his physical and mental exhaustion. The dreary plod of Fatima’s hooves carried them on across the yellow landscape for hour after hour and Jack fell into a glum trance, gritty eyelids half closed as the heat and ennui peaked in the late afternoon and he was no closer to a decision about how he should behave that night. 

At first he thought he was imagining a figure approaching on foot, in a tunic almost the colour of the sand and a head wrap of light bluey-green, a hue which incongruously reminded Jack of the sea at Queenscliff. But the man was not a mirage and he approached relentlessly, waving something white in his right hand as he came closer.

“Miss Fisher? Miss Phryne Fisher?” 

“Yes.” 

“This is for you.”

The messenger ran off in the direction they had traversed and Jack spared a moment to wonder where the man was headed. Such idle concerns were blasted out of his head, though, when Phryne read the contents of the letter from her mother-in-law. The Maharaja of Alwar was dead, murdered! Jack’s kind nature had never been blunted to death even by repeated exposure at war and at work, and he took a moment to feel sorry for the murdered man and his loved ones. But then the freight train hit him: Phryne was widowed - technically single once more.

Jack caught about half of the onslaught of excited words that burst from Phryne as she urged Fatima onward over the next couple of hours, throwing over her shoulder schemes and ideas about how she could most efficiently traverse the thousands of miles between their present location and Alwar. She was obliged to go, she declared, to farewell her late husband properly, and to play the grieving widow convincingly so as to deflect any suspicions that the Maharaja’s family had been complicit in arranging or supporting a marriage of convenience. She needed to comfort her mother-in-law, a lovely woman so understanding about her son’s predicament and so grateful for Phryne’s solution. She hoped she may be able to bring her young sister-in-law, a bright, curious teenager, back with her to further her education in England. And, most importantly, a murder! Wild horses (or recalcitrant camels) would not keep her away. The journey would be long and difficult and she debated attempting it by land versus in her trusty plane.

Jack was used to Phryne processing her ideas aloud and he knew that he did not really need to contribute when she was on a planning rampage, other than to make assenting noises just often enough that she didn’t query his silence. Luckily, this left most of Jack’s heart free to process the seismic shift in context of their relationship, and his brain free to formulate plans of his own. 

Detective Inspector Robinson marshalled the facts: 1. Phryne was no longer a married woman. 2. He was immutably a man of honour. 3. Even a man of honour might properly make a romantic overture to an unmarried woman of a suitable age, after a long and respectful friendship. And a reasonably liberal-minded man could contemplate doing so outside of an actual marriage, without completely deserting his honour. Queen Victoria had been dead for almost 30 years and perhaps it was time for him to exercise a more modern approach, now that the danger of causing any actual marital betrayal was past. 

Jack honed his approach as silently as Phryne honed hers aloud, over the remaining daylight time before they stopped to make camp. There would be no mention of telescopes. No ruses. He would not resort to shooting a tarantula, real or imagined. His plan was honest and straightforward: he would return to their conversation about fears from the previous night. He would tell Phryne that he had realized she was scared of one more thing: him. He would point out that she was terrified that if she loved him, he would transform her into a policeman’s wife and try to stop her from saving the world. He would ask for her heart and reveal that she already held his own. With his utter honesty, honour would be satisfied. He was confident his plan would work.

And it did.

**Author's Note:**

> Clint Belmet appears in Zane Grey’s 1929 novel, Fighting Caravans. Wikipedia provided the scientific classification for a camel.


End file.
